1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of and an apparatus for manufacturing a brewed product, and more particularly to a method of and an apparatus for manufacturing soy sauce (known as "shoyu").
2. Description of the Relevant Art
Heretofore, soy sauce as a brewed product is generally manufactured by a process 600 shown in FIG. 8 of the accompanying drawings under strict quality control. Raw soy sauce 601 produced by pressing moromi mash is analyzed for its ingredients in an adjustment step 602, and controlling elements such as salt, water, and alcohol are added according to the results of the analysis. The raw soy sauce thus adjusted in ingredients is pasteurized in a refining step 603, after which it is decanted in a sediment separation step 604. The decanted soy sauce may be shipped directly as a final object 606 as normal soy sauce. To meet recent various consumer's tastes, a wide variety of soy sauce based products are manufactured such as sauce for meat, soup for Japanese noodle, and soy sauce blended with vinegar and fruit flavor. In order to obtain such various soy sauce based products as a final product 606', the decanted soy sauce from the step 604 is additionally analyzed and adjusted for its ingredients in a step 605. For analyzing the soy sauce for NaCl, nitrogen, and alcohol in the step 605, there have been employed the Moor method, the Kheldahl method, and gas chromatography, respectively.
In the ingredient adjustment steps 602, 605, the raw soy sauce or the decanted soy sauce has been analyzed for NaCl, nitrogen, and alcohol by respective independent analyzing devices through manual operation over a long time. Several hours have been necessary for the analysis of nitrogen in particular. Therefore, the ingredient adjustment steps 602, 605 have been time-consuming, making it difficult to shorten the time required for carrying out the entire process 600 and also to automate the process 600. Tanks for temporarily storing the raw soy sauce and the decanted soy sauce in the ingredient adjustment steps 602, 605 tend to be large in size. As a result, the size of the apparatus used to effect the manufacturing process 600 has been large.
The present invention has been made in an effort to solve the aforesaid problems of the conventional process of manufacturing soy sauce.